Catherine Crump (@CatherineNCrump) clerked for the Hon. M. Margaret McKeown, a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, prior to joining the ACLU. Crump graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. She is a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

A recent cell phone tracking case from New York is both a win and loss for privacy. In People v. Moorer, police officers submitted an emergency or “exigent circumstances” request to a phone company asking it to ping (locate) a cell phone—but the court concluded that the circumstances were not exigent at all. The Stored Communications Act (18 USC 2702) permits the voluntary disclosure (without any kind of court order) of customer records to the government, but only if “the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of information relating to the emergency.”

Two key memos outlining the Justice Department’s views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their…

This week the New York Times revealed the Hemisphere Project, in which the government is paying AT&T for access to an enormous phone records database. While some aspects of the program are unclear, we now know that the government has long collaborated with AT&T to conduct sophisticated data-mining of sensitive telephone records, primarily to identify “burner” phones.

The New York Times Sunday Review included a striking op ed suggesting that universities could one day deploy software to analyze students’ internet usage for the purpose of assessing their mental health. The writers, Sriram Chellappan and Raghavendra…

Thanks to Edward Snowden we now understand that the NSA runs many dragnet surveillance programs, some of which target Americans. But a story yesterday from Washington, D.C. public radio station WAMU is a reminder that dragnet surveillance is not just…

You've got to hand it to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.): He has become one of the foremost members of Congress fighting for Americans' privacy rights, and has worked doggedly to shed light on how the government is using new technologies to monitor us without…

Last night we filed an amicus brief in United States v. Pineda-Moreno, a Ninth Circuit case that could play a significant role in determining how broadly the Supreme Court’s recent GPS tracking decision, United States v. Jones, is applied to…